Lawmakers set the stage for the nuclear weapons debate to come in the next Congress with a wave of bills and rhetoric that burned the post-Thanksgiving fog from Washington this week.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — upon whom partisans and the press have heaped presidential buzz — provided a capstone Thursday with a speech at American University. She articulated a three-point nuclear arms control plan that put Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees on more or less the same policy page.
In the widely covered speech, Warren first proposed that the United States build “[n]o new nuclear weapons,” by which she evidently meant the low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead for which the unified GOP government this year approved $65 million in 2019 development and production funds.
Warren also called for more international arms control, beginning with extending the landmark New START pact between the U.S. and Russia through 2026. Earlier in the day on Capitol Hill, Warren pressed a nominee for a senior National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) leadership position to acknowledge he was more in favor of extending the treaty than not.
Finally, Warren advocated a policy of no-first use, or a formal commitment by the U.S. not to use a nuclear weapon unless an adversary fires one first.
Warren’s three policy bullets were essentially identical to those laid out by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), aspiring chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in the upcoming 116th Congress, in a speech to a Washington-based arms-control group earlier this month.
Also Thursday, Warren and six mostly Democratic senators unveiled a bill aimed at preventing a widespread buildup of intermediate-range missiles, such as those covered by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that President Donald Trump has said the United States will abandon.
The Senate bill, “Prevention of Arms Race Act of 2018,” would among other things prohibit the government from funding “procurement or deployment” of any missiled in the range prohibited by the INF Treaty. The Cold War-era pact covers conventional- and nuclear-armed missiles with a range of 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers (about 310 miles to 3,100 miles). Strategic weapons, those covered by New START, have an essentially global range.
The Senate bill is sponsored by: nuclear-policy heavyweight Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.); Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.); Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.); Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); Warren; and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
The bill was a rapid-fire riposte to a measure introduced Wednesday in the House by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), with the support Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). That proposal, the “Stopping Russian Nuclear Aggression Act,” would would prohibit the Trump administration from funding efforts to extend New START beyond 2021 without renegotiating the deal to curtail Russian missiles in the INF range.
New START is set to expire in 2021, but it could be extended into 2026. If the Cheney-Cotton bill passes, several requirements would have to be met to relieve the funding prohibition — among other things, Trump certifying that a New START extension is in the best interest of the United States, and the Kremlin agreeing to “securing and reducing in a verifiable manner Russian tactical nuclear weapons.”
New START limits both sides to 700 deployed intercontinental- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers; 1,550 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers. The parties said they met their treaty limits in February.
Even if neither bill advances in the 115th Congress, which is set to meet for fewer than two weeks’ worth of work days before ending on Dec. 14, they establish policy positions that could carry over into the two-year session of Congress that begins in January and runs through the next U.S. presidential election in 2020.
